The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for continuously drying a cloth effectively and in a short time.
In subjecting a long cloth to pretreatment or such treatment as industrial dyeing, the treatment must be finished by continuously drying the cloth after washing. For drying a cloth in such instances, conventionally such methods have been adopted as a cylinder drying method, in which a cloth to be dried is transported successively in contact with a plurality of heating cylinders, and a dry hot chamber drying method, in which a cloth is transported in a hanging state successively through a number of drying chambers and is heated respectively at a prescribed temperature.
However, in the cylinder drying method, since the cloth to be dried is guided in contact with heating cylinders, unavoidably the cloth is tension to prevent its shrinkability, so that the cloth is flattened as if ironed to deteriorate its touch feeling. In the dry hot chamber drying method, although the tension applied to the cloth is not as great as in the cylinder drying method, since the cloth is transported in a hanging state while it still contains water, the cloth is still unavoidably tensioned by its own weight, so that shrink drying (no tension drying) can hardly be done, particularly in the drying of a knitted cloth, and moreover, since the interior of the drying chamber must be kept at a high temperature, the heat energy consumption is enormous.
Particularly, in applying a centrifugal separator to remove washing water from a cloth after washing, which has been done particularly in treating a long cylindrical cloth in the usual way, the cloth after treatment is in a ropy state, folded and shrunk irregularly in the width direction of the cloth and twisted to some extent, so that it is necessary preliminarily to untwist and expand the cloth flat in order to perform uniform drying. Conventionally a cloth expanding process has been adopted to untwist and expand the cloth mechanically prior to drying, but in such an expanding process, since the transport speed of the cloth must be slowed down to untwist and expand the cloth, the efficiency of the process is very low.